The Post and Courier Business Review (CHARLESTON, SC) - Talk about getting inside your customer’s head.

Bruce Murdy, president of Charleston advertising and marketing firm Rawle Murdy Associates Inc., this year struck a highly unusual bargain with a major client, the supermarket chain Piggly Wiggly Carolina Co, Inc. He agreed to divide his time for six months platooning between his day job and the Pig’s internal team as the locally based grocer restructured its marketing department.

Looking to lift sales and fill the void left by the departure of its marketing chief earlier this year, Piggly Wiggly asked Murdy, whose firm has handled that account for 22 years, to serve as its interim marketing director until replacement Christopher Ibsen came on board in September.

Murdy found a staff that didn’t know what people in other departments were doing. They weren’t used to sharing information between ad, research and internal communication divisions. No one had accepted responsibility for the chain’s Web site and e-mail marketing. ‘The biggest challenge I had was changing culture,’ Murdy told the trade publication Advertising Age recently.

What did he do about it? He installed a digital marketing head, moved people around, asked staff for ideas that could be implemented right away, patched communication between marketing and management and reworked the grocer’s media strategy by moving back to mass-media channels, including TV. Sales began to increase.

Piggly Wiggly CEO David Schools doesn’t recommend the ad-coach arrangement for everyone, but he said it worked because it was based on trust from many years of working together.